


delta

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Airplanes, Episode Related, Gen, Movie: The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-16 04:11:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16078136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: What happened on the plane to Texas between The End and Fight The Future.





	delta

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: pre-Fight The Future  
> A/N: For Kristin.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

She still smells smoke when her hair falls across her face. It’s not real; Scully knows that. She’s washed her hair several times in the days since the fire, with the lemon shampoo that covers even the lingering reek of formaldehyde. She hasn’t been down to the office in days, though her finger slips automatically to the lowest button in the elevator before rising again. It isn’t real, but she smells it nonetheless. Mulder would understand - he probably catches the whiff of burned paper when he strips off his undershirt at night - but she can’t tell him. Diana lingers between them like stale cigarette smoke; the choices Mulder made on the Gibson Praise case muddle the air between their temporary desks. Scully can’t decide if the taint of nicotine or the slightly cloying smell of charred manila folders would be more appropriate. 

In the absence of the X-Files, they have been reassigned, as if the powers that be could repurpose them. As if they hadn’t been forged in the basement long before the flames licked around the edges of their evidence. Some swords can’t be beaten into ploughshares, not again. How far did the higher-ups sift through their history before they hit on the terrorist task force as an appropriate venue? Does someone, somewhere, in some smoke-hazy office, know that something’s going to happen, or is it just the general paranoia that undergirds American society? Like the trees that turned out to be one enormous organism, like the fungi that interlace for acres underground, different threads of bigotry are woven through their society, the pretty pattern spoiled and snarled underneath. Her life too has become irretrievably tangled, or at least her mother thinks so. In ways, Scully is grateful that her mother can’t see the ugliness of all the other choices in her life. Maggie Scully can still appreciate a landscape or a tapestry without imagining the brutish scurrying underneath.

Mulder is moody and standoffish, as if he has a right. “They’re wasting our time, Scully,” he says as they deposit their bags at the airline desk. 

“Just consider you’re going back to your roots,” she tells him. “Profiling used to be your thing.”

“Physics used to be yours,” he says. “You using your degree, Doctor Scully?”

“Every time we get on a plane,” she says, gazing steadily up at him. 

“I guess that would make flying more fraught,” he says. “You could always take something and pass out on my shoulder. I’ll even let you drool on me.” A peace offering, she sees in his eyes, but it doesn’t mean much when he doesn’t understand what he did to vex her. The game was afoot. Of course the dog didn’t bark in the night time. Mulder had spent dark hours with Diana, years’ worth if the Lone Gunmen were to be trusted, and somehow that made all the years since they’d spent watching each other’s backs something he either trusted so much or valued so little that he was willing to abandon it. 

“I’ll consider it,” she says. At least on a plane, strapped and wedged into his seat, he can’t ditch her in media res. Unless aliens hijack them, she supposes, in which case, she’ll try to document the process so that she can present their findings to the world without looking foolish. 

They find their seats, window and middle, not an exit row. Scully puts her newly issued coat in the aisle seat, folded so that the bright yellow FBI doesn’t show. She’s been approached at airports for everything from directions to reports of pickpocketing. She doesn’t want to spend the flight peered at and interrogated. Fortunately, the door closes without anyone in the seat. Mulder hands her his jacket as well. She piles them together and weighs them down with the buckle of the seat belt.

“You’re mad at me,” he says as the flight attendant approaches with beverages. Scully is lost in the relative merits of ginger ale (fizzy, too sweet, may give her a headache) versus coffee (caffeinated, acrid, may give her heartburn). 

“I’m not mad,” she says absently.

“Something’s wrong,” he says. “Throw me a line here, Scully. My profiling skills are rusty.”

“I’m frustrated,” she says and he groans quietly. 

“You’re frustrated,” he repeats. “That’s a mom thing to say.”

Grief flickers through her and she can see that he regrets his choice of words. He bumps his shoulder gently against hers. “Hey. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“You were there for me through everything with Emily,” she says, looking him straight in the eye for what feels like the first time in months. “You’ve been there for me through some of the most difficult moments in my life. Sometimes lately it still feels like you shut me out of those same moments in your own life.”

He shifts in his seat. “It’s not personal, Scully.”

“It’s not personal,” she says. “Exactly.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asks, defensive. “Cry on your shoulder?”

“You could have told me about your history with Diana,” she says. “I went to see her in the hospital. She’s expected to make a full recovery.”

“That’s not personal,” he says, avoiding her eyes. “It’s the past.”

“The past doesn’t leave us, Mulder,” she says. “Otherwise regression hypnosis wouldn’t be profitable or therapeutic.”

He sighs. “I don’t know what to say about it,” he tells her. “I don’t know why I still trust her, but I owed her the benefit of the doubt.”

 _And not me?_ She doesn’t ask the question, but it still drifts up between them, soundless as smoke.

“She’s important to me,” he says. “She believes in the X-Files. I believe in her commitment to the truth. Sometimes we’ve all done things in the course of our investigations that seemed incongruous.”

Scully inclines her head in acknowledgement. The drinks cart rattles closer. Club soda, she decides. Maybe the stinging freshness of the bubbles will clear the memory of smoke from her sinuses and the taste of Mulder’s mealymouthed half-apology from the back of her throat. The flight attendant thinks they’re married. Neither of them says anything as they accept their cups of ice and bags of peanuts.

“I didn’t know you wanted to be part of my misery,” Mulder says as Scully tips the last of her honey-roasted peanuts into her palm. A small indulgence to offset her distaste for flying.

“Mulder, I couldn’t escape being part of your misery if I wanted to,” she says. She crumples the empty bag onto her tray and licks the nuts out of her palm. With her clean hand, she touches his forearm where he’s rolled up the sleeve of his dress shirt. He gets hot on airplanes. She can feel how cool her fingers are against his skin. “For the record, I don’t want to.”

“Here I am, stuck in the middle with you,” he says blithely. 

“Some days, I feel stuck,” she says. “Some days, I feel like Bonnie and Clyde.”

“I can’t recommend robbing banks, Scully,” he says. “It’s not as much fun as it looks. But I’m sure we can make our own fun in Dallas.”

“There’s fun in Dallas?” she asks skeptically.

“You’ll see,” he says with confidence. “Don’t we always find a way?”

“Frequently the wrong way,” she says.

“I took the way less traveled by,” he tells her. “It’s made all the difference.”

“I know it has,” she says, and leans back against the headrest. The last of her club soda is fizzing in her plastic cup. It sounds almost aggressive, the way the ice amplifies the popping of the bubbles. But it tastes clean and fresh when she raises it to her lips. All she can smell is the crispness of ice, a microclimate that will vanish, inevitably, as the water shifts states into a tepid liquid she won’t want to drink. The only constant is change. The ice doesn’t lose itself; the water retains the memory of what it was, and becomes ice when the conditions are met. That’s comforting. She’s heard the murmurs of ice queen around the bullpen before, but ice has structure and clarity that smoke doesn’t. Ice remembers. It can hold the evidence inside it of thousands of years, preserving a perfect record of how things used to be. She becomes aware that she’s gazing into her cup and sets it down. She hasn’t been sleeping well. Her dreams are all hazy at the edges.

“You’re looking sleepy there, partner,” Mulder says in what he seems to believe is a Texas accent. It’s no better than it was when they were chasing vampires in Cheney. He pats his shoulder. “I’m here if you need me.”

She lets herself lean against him. For a moment, he tenses, but then his muscles ease under her head. When she takes a deep breath, he smells like soap and heat. 

“We’re not going to a cowboy bar,” she tells him.

“You say that now, Scully.” His arm rises and falls gently under her ear as he breathes. “I bet you’ll be boot scoot boogieing with the rest of the Texans in no time.”

“I didn’t bring my cowboy boots,” she says.

“There’s your first mistake,” he tells her. “You’ve got the wrong attitude about this trip. I’ll show you.”

“I’m sure you will,” she says, yawning, and the rest of whatever he says fades into the steady hum of the engines.


End file.
